I was thinking the other day about a book I read part of when I was a teenager. It was an old copy, though, and there was a chunk of a dozen or so pages missing from the middle of it, and I stopped reading because I couldn’t deal with missing part of the narrative. I’d guess it was written sometime in the '60s or the '70s.
The setting was a village surrounded by impenetrably deep woods, which, as far as its inhabitants know, comprises the entirety of human civilization. Most of the animals in this world are sapient and capable of human speech. The dogs and the birds are allies to the humans, but the wolves have been their enemies for centuries and there’s been an uneasy Cold War-ish peace. As the story opens, the wolves have started making unprecedented incursions into the village, attacking farms and killing people, and the leader of the humans believes an all-out war is impending, which the humans will surely lose. There are ancient legends of another human colony existing somewhere on the other side of the woods, and with the help of the dogs and the birds, he decides to lead a force into the woods to find them, either for reinforcements or for somewhere to live once the wolves overrun and destroy the village.
Sound familiar to anyone?